New Substantive Revision to the SEP Entry on the Epistemology of Modality

 Here.

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Descartes' Modal Epistemology

Rough draft. In progress. In what follows, I will explicate what I call ‘the Cartesian Package’.  The Cartesian Package provides the basis for Descartes’ unique account of modal epistemology.  It has two main components: an account of the nature of objects and an account of forming adequate conceptions of them.   Take the former component first.  Given Descartes’ account of homogeneous objects, every object has a structure of properties that are related to one another in a way that’s crucial for his modal epistemology, as we will see.  First, they have a principal attribute, which is the most general and fundamental feature of an object.  This feature is a determinable, and it specifies the kind of object that a thing is, and all of the other sorts of properties that the thing can have.  Descartes, of course, took extension to be the principal attribute of material objects.   Second, objects have other attributes that flow necessarily and transpar...
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Essential Properties and Possible Worlds

Kit Fine famously argued for the inadequacy of possible-worlds analysis of essence. Below is a related criticism of my own.  Call the phenomenon of a bearer having a property in all of the worlds it occupies, ‘rigid exemplification’.  What’s the relationship between essential properties and rigid exemplification? On the standard possible-worlds account, the latter constitutes an analysis of the former: the right-hand side gives a list of the constituents of the item expressed on the left-hand side: (EPdef) F is an essential property of x =def.  x has F in all (metaphysically) possible worlds in which x exists. A slightly weaker account of the relationship has it that while the latter isn’t an analysis of the constituents of the former, the latter and the former are yet necessarily co-extensive : (EPiff) Necessarily, F is an essential property of x if, and only if, x has F in all (metaphysically) possible worlds in which x exists. I worry that EPdef and EPiff are both fals...
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Yablo's "Is Conceivability a Guide to Possibility?": Classic Papers in Modal Epistemology Series

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